Me, Gordon, Lisa, and Peepy in the City of Big Shoulders

Thursday, April 29, 2010

So I’m back from the IRA Convention in Chicago (no, not that IRA — the International Reading Association!), and it’s taken me a few days to recover. Okay, it started out great. The view from my hotel room (right) was magnificent, but it took me a while to upload, because I lost my camera cable. I don’t usually lose things, but that first night got me pretty verklempt. At dinner I met some famous authors, like 1000640http://www.barbarakerley.com/index.htmlBarbara Kerley, who wrote the amazing Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and Lisa Yee, who brought …

Peepy.

You don’t know Peepy? Consider yourself lucky. Peepy knows how to get things from people. I wasn’t only the only one to fall under Peepy’s spell. But I fell hard. Can you figure out what was happening in this sequence?

No? Well, it’s a little embarrassing, but the full story is 1000640http://lisayee.livejournal.com/134638.htmlhere. Suffice it to say that Peepy, acting (maybe) as Lisa’s agent, managed to get all the 39 Clues secrets out of Gordon Korman and me!

Rattled, I tried to concentrate. I even managed to do a presentation:

But I think you can see the weariness in my eyes the next day, while signing books with Gordon. Fortunately, the two of us put our heads together (not a good idea, since neither of us has much padding up there), and decided to snap out of it. To cut our losses. To stick to the matter at hand. In other words, convince every teacher that our book was the one to buy! Occasionally that may have meant stepping on each other’s toes, but hey, you know what they say about the children’s book business. It’s a bunny-eat-bunny world.

I think we managed to escape with our dignity intact (well, some of it). Thank goodness Gordon and I knew of a secret back route where we could avoid the hordes of screaming educators who had discovered we’d revealed classified secrets to a stuffed yellow Peep. Oh. Just one more thing. No matter what anyone tells you, we were not hiding you-know-who in the trunk of this mysterious black limo on the way to the airport. It was just luggage. Really.